Catastrophe quotes:

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  • Catastrophes are often stimulated by the failure to feel the emergence of a domain, and so what cannot be felt in the imagination is experienced as embodied sensation in the catastrophe. -- William Irwin Thompson
  • Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe. -- H. G. Wells
  • Life improves slowly and goes wrong fast, and only catastrophe is clearly visible. -- Edward Teller
  • A hundred times have I thought New York is a catastrophe and 50 times: It is a beautiful catastrophe. -- Le Corbusier
  • The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe. -- Albert Einstein
  • We have been terrorised by what happened in America and we express our condolences to the American people who suffered from this unexpected catastrophe and a new world war. -- Muammar al-Gaddafi
  • Perhaps catastrophe is the natural human environment, and even though we spend a good deal of energy trying to get away from it, we are programmed for survival amid catastrophe. -- Germaine Greer
  • Catastrophe and creation are twins. -- Barbara Marx Hubbard
  • Great breakthroughs are always followed by great catastrophes. -- Rosalia de Castro
  • War is a series of catastrophes which result in victory. -- Albert Pike
  • Catastrophe is numerical. Loss is singular, one beloved at a time. -- Anna Quindlen
  • One approaches the journey's end. But the end is a goal, not a catastrophe. -- George Sand
  • The demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century. -- Vladimir Putin
  • Congress should be forward thinking in the policies we set, instead of waiting until catastrophe looms. -- Bill Frist
  • Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not. -- Isaac Asimov
  • Have you noticed that life, with murders and catastrophes and fabulous inheritances, happens almost exclusively in newspapers? -- Jean Anouilh
  • In 1920 [H.G. Wells] described human history as becoming more and more a race between education and catastrophe. -- Joel Garreau
  • Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe. -- Susan Sontag
  • When a man meets catastrophe on the road, he looks in his purse, but a woman looks in her mirror. -- Margaret Turnbull
  • If some great catastrophe is not announced every morning, we feel a certain void. Nothing in the paper today, we sigh. -- Lord Acton
  • It's sort of well-known that anytime any catastrophe happens anywhere in the world, they can count on the United States for help. -- Morgan Freeman
  • The happiness of most people is not ruined by great catastrophes or fatal errors, but by the repetition of slowly destructive little things. -- Ernest Dimnet
  • Living things have been doing just that for a long, long time. Through every kind of disaster and setback and catastrophe. We are survivors. -- Robert Fulghum
  • It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses. -- Virginia Woolf
  • Catastrophe, riots, factories blowing up, armies in flight, flood - the ear can detect a whole apocalypse in the starry night of the human body. -- Jean Cocteau
  • Catastrophe, riots, factories blowing up, armies in flight, flood - the ear can detect a whole apocalypse in the starry night of the human body." -- Jean Cocteau
  • The term clinical depression finds its way into too many conversations these days. One has a sense that a catastrophe has occurred in the psychic landscape. -- Leonard Cohen
  • Catastrophe and desire are linked in our lives as the moon is linked to that reflected light from the sun which enables the eye to see it. -- Herbert Gold
  • Catastrophe is the essence of the spiritual path, a series of breakdowns allowing us to discover the threads that weave all of life into a whole cloth. -- Joan Halifax
  • Jimmy Fallon and I play regularly at the Bayonne Golf Club in Jersey. He's eighteen holes of fun. Any time we play he has moments of brilliance, but also moments of utter catastrophe. -- Mario Batali
  • Catastrophe was only narrowly averted. It was all due to the faith of one man! Yes, you who called us godless, we found our faith in Adolf Hitler, and through him found God once again. That is the greatness of our day, that is our good fortune! -- Robert Ley
  • The concern around probable questions, which in a sense have been hidden, will grow around the world and the matter is critical, the reason we are doing all this is so we can respond correctly to what is reported to be a major catastrophe on the African continent. -- Thabo Mbeki
  • History is a race between education and catastrophe. -- H. G. Wells
  • Mankind has survived all catastrophes. It will also survive modern medicine -- Gerhard Kocher
  • Life delivered me a catastrophe, but I found a richness of soul. -- Michael J. Fox
  • If left unchecked, global change will create violent conflict, torrential storms, shrinking coastlines, and irreversible catastrophe. -- Valerie Jarrett
  • Success is not built on success. It's built on failure. It's built on frustration. Sometimes its built on catastrophe. -- Sumner Redstone
  • There are two problems for our species' survival - nuclear war and environmental catastrophe - and we're hurtling towards them. Knowingly. -- Noam Chomsky
  • Virtues, like viruses, have their seasons of contagion. When catastrophe strikes, generosity spikes like a fever. Courage spreads in the face of tyranny. -- Nancy Gibbs
  • The notion that one will not survive a particular catastrophe is, in general terms, a comfort since it is equivalent to abolishing the catastrophe. -- Iris Murdoch
  • Preventing global warming from becoming a planetary catastrophe may take something even more drastic than renewable energy, superefficient urban design, and global carbon taxes. -- Jamais Cascio
  • Racism is a moral catastrophe, most graphically seen in the prison industrial complex and targeted police surveillance in black and brown ghettos rendered invisible in public discourse. -- Cornel West
  • We're running the most dangerous experiment in history right now, which is to see how much carbon dioxide the atmosphere... can handle before there is an environmental catastrophe. -- Elon Musk
  • The Washington leadership has put aside non-proliferation programmes and devoted its energies and resources to driving the country to war by extraordinary deceit, then trying to manage the catastrophe it created in Iraq. -- Noam Chomsky
  • I'll never forget Hurricane Katrina - the mix of a natural and a man-made catastrophe that resulted in the death of over 1,500 of our neighbors. Millions of folks were marked by the tragedy. -- Cedric Richmond
  • Most marriages are a mess, and the children get caught between two bitter, antagonistic parents. My parents stayed married for 27 unhappy years, till their kids were grown, and this was a catastrophe for us. -- Anne Lamott
  • We don't want to go back to the same policies and the same practices that drove our economy into a ditch, that punished the middle class, and that led us to this catastrophe. We have to keep moving forward. -- David Axelrod
  • We all wish to live. We all seek a world in which men are freed of the burdens of ignorance, poverty, hunger and disease. And we shall all be hard-pressed to escape the deadly rain of nuclear fall-out should catastrophe overtake us. -- Haile Selassie
  • In our interconnected world, novel technology could empower just one fanatic, or some weirdo with a mindset of those who now design computer viruses, to trigger some kind of disaster. Indeed, catastrophe could arise simply from technical misadventure - error rather than terror. -- Martin Rees
  • Five centuries from now - barring unimaginable catastrophe - the moon will be developed real estate. There's economic incentive to exploit the moon - the helium-3 will be useful in powering fusion reactors, and the rare earth elements could supplant the limited terrestrial supply of these materials. -- Seth Shostak
  • When you wake up each morning, you can choose to be happy or choose to be sad. Unless some terrible catastrophe has occurred the night before, it is pretty much up to you. Tomorrow morning, when the sun shines through your window, choose to make it a happy day. -- Lynda Resnick
  • If you are a good person, you will probably be a good father. Try not to worry too much. If you don't feel apprehensive just before your first child arrives, you are abnormal. Though catastrophe doesn't come as often in childbirth as it did a few generations ago, we naturally fear it. -- Clyde Edgerton
  • I was a mother who worked ridiculously hard to keep catastrophe at bay. I didn't allow my kids to eat hamburgers for fear of E. coli. I didn't allow them to play with rope, string, balloons - anything that might strangle them. They had to bite grapes in half, avoid lollipops, eat only when I could watch them. -- Ann Hood
  • I'm planning a catastrophe. -- Leonard Cohen
  • I'll tickle his catastrophe. -- James Joyce
  • Continued inflation inevitably leads to catastrophe. -- Ludwig von Mises
  • No connection between Iraq and the 9/11 catastrophe. -- Richard Ben-Veniste
  • Floating high on the waters of catastrophe -- Julien Gracq
  • Sometimes a catastrophe is simply a course correction. -- James A. Owen
  • Saw Washington Monument. Phallic. Appalling. A national catastrophe. -- Arnold Bennett
  • It's like we're a catastrophe waiting to happen. -- J. Lynn
  • History is a constant race between invention and catastrophe. -- Frank Herbert
  • Americans learn only from catastrophe and not from experience. -- Theodore Roosevelt
  • Know the difference between a catastrophe and an inconvenience. -- Bruce Lee
  • History: the category of human phenomena which tends to catastrophe. -- Jules Romains
  • The environmental crisis is a signal of this approaching catastrophe. -- Barry Commoner
  • They [Democrats] are the troubadours and the crooners of catastrophe. -- Clare Boothe Luce
  • The universe remains dark. We are animals struck by catastrophe. -- Jean-Paul Sartre
  • Most of us would rather risk catastrophe than read the directions.... -- Mignon McLaughlin
  • That which has quelled me, lives with me, Accomplice in catastrophe. -- Edna St. Vincent Millay
  • Being broke is not a disgrace, it is only a catastrophe. -- Rex Stout
  • I think religion has caused so much catastrophe in the world. -- Kirk Douglas
  • Our claim to our own bodies and our world is our catastrophe. -- W. H. Auden
  • Marrying any man is risky. Marrying a famous man is kissing catastrophe. -- John Colton
  • The automobile is the greatest catastrophe in the entire history of City architecture. -- Philip Johnson
  • We need not stride resolutely towards catastrophe, merely because those are the marching orders. -- Noam Chomsky
  • George Bush is a catastrophe for the world. And a dream for Bin Laden. -- Richard Dawkins
  • You, Ms. Lane, are a menace to others! A walking, talking catastrophe in pink! -- Karen Marie Moning
  • Other than sports, only war and catastrophe can create this sort of national unity. -- Simon Kuper
  • Our Strategic Petroleum Reserve is there for a natural disaster or some other catastrophe. -- Jason Chaffetz
  • We see an extensive program of dismantling state institutions... These are ingredients for catastrophe. -- Iyad Allawi
  • I think that Windows 8 is kind of a catastrophe for everybody in the PC space. -- Gabe Newell
  • One man's death: that is a catastrophe. A hundred thousand dead: that is a statistic -- Kurt Tucholsky
  • It's not natural for people in the opposition to leave. It's always a personal catastrophe. -- Masha Gessen
  • The unavoidable kiss, where the minty fresh death breath is sure to outlast his catastrophe. -- Jason Mraz
  • Stupid people can cause problems, but it usually takes brilliant people to create a real catastrophe. -- Thomas Sowell
  • Washington's adventuristic policy, whipping up international tension to the utmost, is pushing mankind towards nuclear catastrophe. -- Konstantin Chernenko
  • We are in a race between cooperation and catastrophe, and the threat is outrunning our response. -- Sam Nunn
  • Except for fools and madmen, everyone knows that nuclear war would he an unprecedented human catastrophe. -- Carl Sagan
  • Every intimacy carries secreted somewhere below its initial lovely surfaces, the ever-coiled makings of complete catastrophe. -- Elizabeth Gilbert
  • Prophesying catastrophe is incredibly banal. The more original move is to assume that it has already happened. -- Jean Baudrillard
  • If being rightwing is thinking that Karl Marx's doctrine was a catastrophe for humanity, then I'm rightwing. -- Niall Ferguson
  • The catastrophe now threatening us is unprecedented - and we often confuse the unprecedented with the improbable. -- Al Gore
  • A Tory government with a decent mandate seems the only hope of tackling the fiscal catastrophe responsibly. -- Max Hastings
  • Better to be caught in sudden, complete catastrophe than to be gnawed by the cancer of imagination. -- Yukio Mishima
  • I'm not one of those famous people flying round the world emoting over every catastrophe. I'm too feeble. -- Kristin Scott Thomas
  • A wise man who stands firm is a statesman, a foolish man who stands firm is a catastrophe. -- Adlai Stevenson I
  • When you inherit the level of economic catastrophe that President Obama inherited, it was a real touch-and-go situation. -- Hillary Clinton
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  • One may as well be optimistic. The road to catastrophe will be rougher if it's paved with dread. -- John Perry Barlow
  • The world can, in effect, get along without natural resources, so exhaustion is just an event, not a catastrophe. -- Robert Solow
  • These days, everything is magnified very quickly by the media - the slightest slip can turn into a catastrophe. -- Valerie Trierweiler
  • Now financial liberalization is just a catastrophe waiting to happen, and there are very well understood reasons for that. -- Noam Chomsky
  • Wall Street billionaires are predicting that Roosevelt-style railroad rate regulation will sooner or later bring about financial catastrophe. [ca. 1906] -- Edmund Morris
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  • We have found ways to capture, kill and market ocean wildlife on an unprecedented scale. It's an absolute catastrophe. -- Sylvia Earle
  • The battle of Kursk... the forcing of the Dnieper... and the liberation of Kiev, left Hitlerite Germany facing catastrophe. -- Vasily Chuikov
  • Unless we free ourselves from a dependence on these fossil fuels... we are condemning future generations to global catastrophe -- Barack Obama
  • The sense of national catastrophe is inevitably heightened in a television age, when the whole country participates in it. -- R. W. Apple
  • As with almost every significant aspect of the Bush presidency, its handling of 9/11 was a catastrophe from start to finish. -- Eric Alterman
  • Everything trends towards catastrophe & collapse. I am interested, geared up & happy. Is it not horrible to be built like that? -- Winston Churchill
  • When opting out from partnership is so easy, every minor disagreement is perceived as a major catastrophe and irreparable disaster. -- Zygmunt Bauman
  • Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else. -- Don DeLillo
  • The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe -- Walter Benjamin
  • The only way to get our society to truly change is to frighten people with the possibility of a catastrophe. -- Daniel Botkin
  • Rather than saying 'I hate mess', it might draw more compassion to say, 'mess terrifies me as a harbinger of catastrophe'. -- Alain de Botton
  • Extinction catches Man by surprise because no one can even imagine that such a catastrophe can happen to an intelligent species. -- Bill Gaede
  • A clever man reaps some benefit from the worst catastrophe, and a fool can turn even good luck to his disadvantage. -- Francois de La Rochefoucauld
  • For those of us in the financial world, Black Friday has a strong negative connotation, referring to a stock market catastrophe. -- Mark Skousen
  • We hope that as a species we're capable of dealing with environmental catastrophe before it actually does collectively kill most of us. -- Moby
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